The A – Z of Artful Journaling: F is for Future-Spreads

When I decorate my artful journal spreads, I like to do a bunch at a time, so that I have a few days’ worth of pages prepped. That way, I can write on spirit-lifting pages whenever I need to. Recently, I’ve also started prepping future-spreads. By ‘future-spreads’ I mean pages that are readied much further ahead in my journal – on pages I won’t reach for weeks, even months.

The reason I’ve done this, is that I thought it would be helpful – to my recovery from mental illness and for my wellness in general – to have ready-made prompts, dotted throughout my journal, reminding me about things that are important to me and my wellbeing. So far, I’ve done a future-spread for things that bring me hope (above) and one for things for which I’m grateful (below).

I also plan to make some future-spreads on the following themes:

People I love

Places I like

Songs I enjoy

Favourite foods

Soothing scents

Best things about this day/week/month/year

As well as these, I’m going to dot some inspirational quotes around too, many of which I picked up on Recovery College courses.

Now that I think about it, what I’m actually doing is integrating my journal with my Wellness Tool Kit: a book in which I wrote down lots of recovery prompts – you can watch my YouTube video about it here. I haven’t felt the need to refer to my WTK much lately, partly because I’ve internalised so much of what’s in there, but I do think it’s important to keep overtly reminding myself of these things, so I don’t forget what’s good for me!

How about you? Do you ever do future-spreads? How do you remind yourself of the things that keep you well?